OWLIM v4 beta is headed for new horizons in RDF storage

Ontotext are pleased to announce the release of *OWLIM version 4.0* 
(beta). This is a major development for the OWLIM family of 
RDF Databases and offers a number of fundamental changes aimed at 
better differentiation between the editions of the product as well as 
some important new features and enhancements.

With this release, Ontotext have rebranded their line of OWLIM editions 
<http://www.ontotext.com/owlim/editions> and introduced a new member of 
the family:

    * *OWLIM Lite* is the new name of SwiftOWLIM
    * *OWLIM SE* (Standard Edition) is the new name of BigOWLIM; it is
      positioned as a single-server product,
    * *OWLIM Enterprise* is an extension of *OWLIM SE*, which includes
      the Replication Cluster
      <http://www.ontotext.com/owlim/replication-cluster> capabilities.
      It is priced and sold as a separate product intended for scalable,
      high-resilience, mission-critical installations, offering extended
      online re-configuration and other features which improve manageability

*Scalability to 1 trillion nodes:* A brand new indexing mechanism has 
been developed for OWLIM SE that uses a configurable bit-size for 
internal identifiers of nodes in the RDF graph (URIs, blank nodes 
and literals). For very large datasets, the bit-size can be set to 40 
bits, allowing up to 1 trillion unique entities to be stored.

*Faster SPARQL 1.1 Query support:* Thanks to Ontotext's investment in 
development resource for the Sesame project, all OWLIM editions now 
boast support for this evolving SPARQL standard. While handling of 
SPARQL 1.1 through Jena was fast enough to allow OWLIM to get excellent 
scores in the latest BSBM evaluation 
<http://www.ontotext.com/owlim/references>, using SPARQL 1.1 through 
Sesame makes it even faster and available in all editions of OWLIM. 
SPARQL 1.1 Query specification offers new features such as: Aggregates, 
Subqueries, Negation, Expressions in the SELECT clause, Property Paths, 
Assignment, Short form for CONSTRUCT and an expanded set of functions 
and operators. Federation will be supported in a subsequent release.

*Easy server deployment: *every edition of OWLIM includes 
re-packaged Sesame Web applications for easy deployment of OWLIM 
servers. Now OWLIM can be deployed simply by copying a WAR file. New 
OWLIM repository instances can be created using the Sesame Workbench 
UI administration tool.

There are number of other new features for specific editions:

    * OWLIM SE now provides a remote notification mechanism that
      includes transaction information.
    * Performance analytics: OWLIM SE provides information on cache
      utilization and behaviour through a JMX interface. This feature
      can be useful when investigating loading behaviour and query
      performance.
    * OWLIM Lite is now packaged as a single jar file, with a
      simpler free-for-use licensing scheme.

Note: This beta release can not be used with existing OWLIM storage 
files. The full release due in couple of weeks time will include an 
automatic upgrade facility for updating files created using previous 
versions.

The OWLIM team.